


the leaning grasses and two lights above the sea

by Toft



Category: Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-21 10:53:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17042375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Toft/pseuds/Toft
Summary: One year after the wedding, a procession comes up the mountain from Gont Harbor.





	the leaning grasses and two lights above the sea

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Northland](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Northland/gifts).



> Title from "Ars Poetica" by Archibald Macleish, suggested by my brilliant beta, [ ]!

The procession coming up the mountain from Gont Harbor became visible in the late morning through the shimmering air; it had rained the night before in vast summer sheets, and now, unexpectedly, heat steamed the mud, and huge black flies buzzed and bit. It was, nonetheless, undoubtedly a procession, or aspiring to be. Still an hour or two away, seven or eight figures in bright court clothes wound their way slowly towards Ogion’s farmhouse with a laborious splendour that would no doubt be very muddy by the time they got here. Tenar sighed, and went to see what they had in the larder. She did not, however, put away her spinning. They would find her at work, not waiting on their leisure.

Ged returned with a basket containing sorrel for tonight’s stew (if they were still to have stew, with visitors; there would not be enough for so many) and three small, furry peaches. He displayed them to her as if he’d hunted and killed them himself. She smiled at his pride, in spite of herself. “Three!”

His white teeth flashed in his dark face. “I told you that manure would help.”

Hating to break his mood, and irritated already at the anticipation of how he would react, Tenar gestured down the hill. “We’ve visitors.”

Ged walked slowly – he walked slowly, these days – to the top of the path, and looked. When he came back, Tenar looked at his face and sighed. Still the same, then.

“I told him not to come. Unwanted guests shouldn’t impose themselves.”

“We can hardly turn them away, after that walk,” she pointed out mildly.

“Maybe you can’t,” Ged muttered, and disappeared into the darkness of the house with his peaches. 

The day toiled on. Two of the travellers below peeled off from the party and turned back down the mountain. She hoped they had water with them; they’d be lucky to hail a cart, at this time of day. She felt the complacency of a country dweller at the foolish ways of city folk. The oatcakes came out of the oven, and she ate one hot with thin slices of peach and hard cheese. A full hour later than she had expected them, the dishevelled, dusty band approached her doorstep. She had given up on spinning, after all, when her shoulder started to ache, but she had stitching in her lap for the look of the thing. Ged had not re-emerged from the house; he had probably left by the back.

“Greetings,” she said, from her chair.

“Our most humble greetings, Tenar, Peace-Bringer,” said the first of the party, a man. His face was familiar, and made her think of the palace at Havnor; as she had the thought, the Queen of Earthsea rushed past him toward her. Tenar’s stitching fell to the ground.

“Tenar!” 

“Seserakh!”

The tall young woman enfolded her in an embrace, Kargish words tumbling over each other, and, to her surprise, Tenar felt her eyes fill with tears. “I missed you so much, I have so much to tell you! Oh, I hope your husband will not be too angry that we came! Lebannen isn’t with us yet, he’s down in the valley meeting with the fishing guilds today, but he will come up tomorrow unless you send down. He does not want to impose but he loves Ged so very much.”

Ged’s name rang oddly in her voice, and Tenar smiled, startled by the intimacy with which she used it and the King’s name together. A year since the wedding, and much had changed. She became conscious of the misery of the travellers behind the queen, and stepped back. Seserakh instantly recollected herself.

“May we trespass upon your kindness, Mother Tenar of the Ring? My friends are hot and thirsty,” she said, in Hardic. Tenar raised her eyebrow at the address, both halves of it, since said ring was currently on Seserakh’s wrist, but nodded, and gestured towards the bench on the shaded porch. Seserakh’s accent had softened into an attractive, lilting grace, and the phrase had come easily, for all that she had probably rehearsed it. More change.

“I have more cups inside, and a jug,” she said. “Chancellor Marren, will you help me?”

She had remembered the little man’s name. He jerked at her address, as if a fly had bit him; perhaps it had. But he followed her inside meekly, and took the cups and jug, heavy with water from the spring and beaded with condensation.

She served her guests cold spring water, oatcakes, honey from Farmer Beech’s hives, and cheese from the goats. To do the queen’s attendants credit, they produced wine, sausages, and bread, but they still ate all the honey. There was not much conversation as they ate, and Tenar drank in Seserakh. She wore sensible boots and leggings for walking, like a man, her face bare even in this mixed company, but her hair was covered with a red gauze, from which damp frizzy curls escaped. An interesting compromise. She glowed from the exercise, radiant where her companions looked bedraggled. The only other woman in attendance – the queen would not be unchaperoned, of course – was a Gontish woman, the wife of the new mayor of Valmouth, and she exchanged cautious nods with Tenar. She was a stocky, quiet woman of forty or so, and she was known to be able to read and write. She would be going on to the farms even further up, to speak with the landholders about the yearly tracing of the bounds and take notes of the births and deaths, but she would not have time to see them all today, she said, with a sidelong look at the courtiers. What awe she might have had for the men of Havnor had obviously been eroded during their ridiculously slow progress up the mountain.

The guests stood all at once when Ged appeared behind her, wiping his hands on a rag. He was gruff with them, silent, and bowed over Seserakh’s hand with only a shadow of his old grace, tolerating her stare with obvious discomfort. When Tenar said, “Perhaps the king’s men would like to see the lookout on the Overfell,” he shrugged, and turned without a word, not looking to see if they followed.

Seserakh’s eyes followed him. “Such eyebrows!” she whispered, eyes huge.

“Is he as you imagined?” Tenar said, amused. 

Seserakh compressed her lips, for a second the mirror of her husband, and Tenar smiled to herself. “He does not look like a wizard.”

“He would say he isn’t one.” Tenar switched into Hardic for the benefit of the mayor’s wife, who was looking askance at them. Always a foreigner, she thought ruefully. She was still Goha at Oak Farm, where people looked at her and saw Flint’s wife and Spark’s mother, but in the sleepy mountain village of Re Albi, as in the palace of Havnor, she was Tenar. “Where will you stay tonight? You’ll be hard set to get down the mountain by nightfall.” She looked at the sky. 

“I must be off,” said Mistress Rowan, standing in the same moment. “Rain, you think?”

“In a few hours.”

“Is the idiot girl still up at the witch’s house?” She spoke without rancor. These were facts.

“Heather. Yes. She keeps chickens.”

“Worth me going up there?” 

“Not unless you want eggs. Moss – Hatha - passed in the spring.”

Rowan nodded. “You sent word. I have her down here.” No wizards had come up the mountain as they had for Ogion-who-was-Aihal. But a witch’s passing was still worth remembering. Tenar was pleased.

Rowan bobbed her head and curtseyed to Seserakh, nodded at Tenar. Then she was winding her way up the mountain at a fast, free pace. Seserakh watched her, then turned a full circle and laughed.

“Alone!” She spoke in Hardic, then repeated it in Kargish.

“You’ve learned the language well.”

“With your help. After you left, it was harder.”

“Has Lebannen learned any Kargish?”

She tensed as she spoke, braced for disappointment, she realized; even though it had all come right with Seserakh, she still had been shaken in her trust, even as she knew she was not being entirely fair. He was the king. He was a good boy. He was not perfect. But Seserakh turned a radiant smile on her. “A little.”

“Good,” said Tenar. She felt that Seserakh wanted to tell her more; she also felt the reticence she felt with Apple. A mother should not know too much of her daughter’s business. But this was not Apple. “How are you?”

“Oh, it is so good to speak my own language,” Seserakh said, and heaved a huge sigh, spreading herself back against the bench. “It is so good to be out of a crowd.”

“A queen has courtiers for thoughts,” Tenar said.

Seserakh laughed aloud. “You know that one!” She broke out in a dusky alto, “A queen has courtiers, courtiers for thoughts, Like a bees in a hive, they – how does it go?” 

“I don’t remember. I’m not sure I ever knew the whole song.” Where had she picked that up? Perhaps Duby had sung it to her. It was so strange, speaking Kargish; it was as if it were suddenly possible to remember things from her childhood that seemed from a different world, unimaginable in Hardic. Perhaps that was why Seserakh could go bare faced, now. One could imagine oneself differently, in another language; or perhaps, it became possible to forget who one had been.

“The songs are different here,” Seserakh said, suddenly pensive, as if following her thought.

“Yes.”

“They’ve been teaching me. I want to be able to teach my children both ways.”

Tenar raised an eyebrow. “Are you…”

A wry little shrug. “Not yet.”

Tenar hoped that Lebannen was reacting better to the pressure for an heir than for a wife. It seemed unlikely. Seserakh studied the toes of her boots.

“You have a daughter, don’t you?” she said suddenly. “Of your body, I mean. Not -”

Tenar felt a pang, and Seserakh reached out a hand to her with a stricken expression. 

“I am sorry. You miss her.”

Tenar nodded towards the lookout, where the men were. “Ged says, if she comes, she will come from there; if she doesn’t come, she is there.”

There was an impatience in the air, and the grey bellies of the clouds hung low. She began to gather the detritus of their meal and carry it inside. Seserakh leaped up to help, putting things in the wrong place with an earnestness that was almost heartbreakingly charming. She must have the palace at her feet, Tenar thought.

Seeming twice as many as they were, the men returned. They would lodge elsewhere in Re Albi, it seemed, leaving the queen with Tenar and Ged. Who safer? And the king would come up the mountain in the morning for his wife, and to pay his respects to Hawk the farmer, the archmage as was. Tenar looked to Ged’s face, but nothing showed there.

“Did you tell them it would rain?” she said, as they watched their coloured jackets bob away through the gorse.

Ged shrugged one shoulder up, reminding Tenar unpleasantly of Spark. 

“You’ll sleep in the cubby,” she said. “Seserakh and I will share.”

“An apprentice again?”

“Today you seem to be. Go and say hello to your queen. She wants to meet you.” He did not move. “Do you remember,” she said suddenly, then stopped, heart in her throat.

He turned. “Yes?”

“Do you remember my language?” she said, in Kargish.

They had never spoken of it. She had forgotten, until this moment, that their first conversations had been in Kargish; that until he reappeared in Gont as Hawk the farmer, they had never spoken in Hardic. How could she have forgotten that? Perhaps that was why it had been so easy to accept that they would learn each other anew. But perhaps Kargish had been in the part of him that had been unlearned.

“Do you remember?” he repeated her words laboriously. She was confused only for a moment, then she then caught that he did not recognize the verb tense. She repeated the word with the stem, the way Ogion had taught her.

“To remember. I remember. Do you remember? _Seyneha?_ ”

His face cleared. “ _Seynho_. A little,” he said, in Kargish. “Yes.” He sketched a courtly bow to her, with a shade of his old irony, and her heart unlocked a little, to see he was still her Ged. “I remember more, if it please my lady.”

“I only wondered whether the queen and I could discuss your eyebrows without you understanding.”

“Eyebrows?” he said, and she touched above his eye to show him. “That is not a word I ever learned, I think.”

“That’s because handsome Kargish men don’t have big hairy ones.”

“Nor handsome men of Gont,” he said, but he was laughing by now.

Seserakh was looking away politely.

“My lady queen,” Ged said, in Kargish, and her great smile beamed, and Tenar saw the sun fall on Ged’s face. Now, at last, he sees her, she thought, with mingled pride and chagrin. 

“I speak Hardic, if queen permits, my Kargish very poor, so sorry,” he said, and she nodded, as to an equal. Tenar was proud of her.

“Of course. What shall I call you, my lord?”

“My name is Ged, to you. Hawk, to others here.”

“I understand.”

There was an awkward pause.

“I must bring the goats down,” Ged said.

Seserakh’s eyes widened. “There were goats, in my home in the desert. But they were outside the compound.”

“Would you like to come and see them?” Tenar said, amused at Seserakh and at Ged’s obvious dismay. They took the queen of Morred, keeper of the Ring of Elfarran, to see the goats.

Seserakh hung back at first, but, given an apple, held it out, wrist straight; Tenar remembered her desperate courage ascending the ship, that gliding red column with a girl inside. Peg, sensing an easy mark, took the apple and butted up against her hand.

“Oh!” said Seserakh. She dared a stroke of Peg’s brown head.

“Pull her ears,” Ged said. “She likes that.”

Peg bleated, and Seserakh laughed aloud. Wirrel regarded the whole process with disdain, and was even more put out when they began the process of coaxing them down to their pen for the night. Ged flapped his arms, and “Hassss,” Seserakh cried, in imitation of Tenar, and together they got the goats down the hill.

Tenar had half expected that villagers would be thronging to see the queen by now; if the men from Havnor had been discreet, Rowan was not bound by any vow of secrecy. But perhaps they had not told the unlikely story of the queen coming to visit the lady Tenar and her man Hawk, or perhaps the threat of rain, and the distance the villagers kept between them – now partly enforced by Tenar, who hated those who warmed after Therru’s parting – kept gogglers away. Either way, she was glad of their solitude.

“My husband is like you,” Seserakh said to Ged, as they entered the house. “I see you now, in him.” 

“Is that why you came?” He seemed surprised.

“To see the lady Tenar. And to know you. Yes. To know him better, where you are.”

“Ah.”

They ate together, that night, in Aihal’s old, good house. Seserakh stared at everything, interest sharp on her face. She chattered to Tenar, half in Kargish, half in Hardic when she remembered, about the lady Ain, whom Lebannen had, through Tenar’s discreet intervention, asked to instruct the queen in Hardic customs and language; about the intrigues of her ladies-in-waiting who had accompanied her, and, in a completely different tone and register, on the politics of the council, in which she had been sitting with increasingly sophisticated comprehension, even sometimes speaking. Ged did not speak, and Seserakh regarded him sometimes, but did not try to draw him out. Not a word was said about whether the king would come up the mountain tomorrow. Tenar found the old impatience rising in her again; but perhaps she was too wise, now, or too bored, to let it kindle into anger. Ged would find the courage to meet the king as farmer, not archmage, or he would not. Meanwhile, she was content to be proud of this glorious girl. She had feared, when the first herald toiled up the mountain to convey the royal couple’s desire to visit their dear friends on Gont, that there would be a weeping plea to come to Havnor, to manage the birth of a first child, or to intercede between young husband and wife in some marital storm; the realization that she was not needed, only loved, was bittersweet.

After they had put away the stew – there was enough, after all – Seserakh leaned forward in her earnest way and put her hand over Ged’s. His flinch was barely there, but Tenar saw it. He never had learned to be touched easily, like a common man.

“Will you tell me, Ged,” she said, “how my husband was, when you met?”

Tenar thought Ged would refuse. But, after a long look at the fire, he began to speak. “He was – impatient.” A ghost of a smile. “He reminded me of myself. Myself as a young man. Perhaps still.” Silence. “He was… in the present. Very brave. A good man, already.”

She nodded eagerly. Ged raised his palms. “I am no orator, my lady.”

“Orator? I am sorry?”

Tenar repeated the word in Kargish. Seserakh leaned forward, the candlelight making her golden hair flicker.

“To you, I am Seserakh only.”

Ged looked at the table. “You honour a farmer.”

“A friend,” she said. “A… a _hiyadis_.” She looked to Tenar, but she shrugged; it was a Hur-at-Hur word.

“Uncle? Friend-like-father.”

“He was called Arren then,” Ged said. “It means sword, on Enlad. He was a sword, a naked blade, and he would have had me wield him. I left him to wield himself.”

“You did right, I think,” Seserakh said. “When we wed, if you had called, said, Lebannen, my sword, come see boat people again, he will go. Would go.” Defeated by this complex sequence of tenses, she threw up her hands. “Agh! I am tired, I forget my Hardic. But now, I think, not. He would not go. He is more king.”

“Ah,” Ged said.

Seserakh fell into silence and watched him for a moment. Tenar held in her breath, conscious of something fragile shifting between them. She feared Seserakh would press him, but she was too wise for that.

“Will you tell me of the boat people? How do they live on the sea?”

Tenar nodded. “I have never heard that story.”

And Ged told them of the Raft People at the southern edge of the world, using Kargish and Hardic as best he could to summon the open ocean for two women raised in the desert, as the rain fell outside and turned the path down the mountain into a muddy stream.

Tenar and Seserakh washed from the green pitcher that the wizard Alder had mended. Ged went out into the dark to the outhouse, and to check on the chickens, he claimed.

In the nest of blankets on Ged and Tenar’s bed, Seserakh whispered, “Your daughter. On Gont.”

“Yes?” Tenar had forgotten that unfinished conversation.

“What colour is she?”

Tenar smiled into the dark. “Mingled between myself and my husband. He was dark. She is middling. My son is darker now he is older.”

“Is it different, boys and girls?”

“He was a sailor. Always in the sun and the wind.”

“Ah.”

“Is there anything else you want to ask?”

“No, thank you,” Seserakh said, with great dignity. She fell asleep like falling off a rock. Tenar, unused to sharing her bed with a stranger and not having walked up the mountain the previous day, slept fitfully, awake and asleep in turns. She woke once, she thought, to hear Ged opening a door.

She and Ged rose with the dawn as Seserakh slept on, oblivious to the farm’s wants and rhythms. Ged built the fire and made breakfast, and she pulled some weeds from her onions and fed the chickens. Seserakh joined them, bleary eyed, for barley gruel and two more peaches. They ate in companionable silence, until Ged said, “I’ll go up to the goats,” and Seserakh brightened. 

“I, too?”

They waited outside for her to rummage through her bag for a shawl; it was cooler up on the mountain today. They could hear the goats bleating for their late breakfast.

“They’ll break out of the fence if we don’t get up there soon.”

“Go, I follow!” Seserakh cried from inside. They started up the short track. As they walked, Ged sang his old charm of calling under his breath. They were the only words of the Old Speech he still knew – because, he had told Tenar once, he learned them as a child, by sound alone. The goats always ignored him, but perhaps that was because they were goats. At the pen’s gate, he broke off, and turned to her. There was laughter in his eyes, but it was rueful, turned on himself.

“They don’t need us, after all.”

“No.”

“It hurts,” he said, “Loving the young.”

“Yes.”

He took her hand then, and she squeezed his fingers in hers for a few heartbeats’ length. When Seserakh caught up behind them, he did not let go of her hand.

“You may help milk the goats, if you like,” Ged said to Seserakh. “Before Lebannen comes. Then we will have fresh milk for him.” Tenar glanced at him, but there was no edge to his voice. Seserakh turned shining eyes on him. 

“Yes. I will learn.”


End file.
